Category: Geography & Environment

There are hundreds of islands, reefs, sea-stacks and islets around the Scottish coastline. Some have a long Viking history discernible in their culture, dialect and place-names, and the Norsemen’s zealous tree-felling is sometimes put forward as the reason the islands have few trees. However, the harsh, oceanic weather and rocky terrain are undoubted factors. Nevertheless, livestock farming, fishing, tourism and North Sea oil processes keep the small population occupied. However, seabird and sheep numbers tend to outweigh those of humans!

There are three main groups of islands, rich sources of archaeological discoveries, as follows:-

The Hebrides – 200 islands, of which 50 are inhabited, including Scotland’s largest island, Lewis & Harris. Population 45,000 on a total area of 2,800 sq.miles. Split into ‘Outer’ and ‘Inner’ Hebrides by the Sea of the Hebrides and The Minch. Stornoway is the main town. The Outer Hebrides has the UK’s highest lighthouse (682ft. above sea level) and the tallest sheer cliffs (1,400ft.).

The Orkney Islands – 70 islands, 20 inhabited. Population 21,300 on 380 sq.miles in total. The main town is Kirkwall.

The Shetland Islands – 100 islands, 15 inhabited. Population 23,000 on 567 sq.miles in total. The main town is Lerwick. Both Shetland and Orkney name their biggest island ‘Mainland’. Shetland has the UK’s northernmost inhabited island of Unst.

(Image: mapswire.com / CC BY 4.0)

Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944), born in London, had a glittering, award-winning career as an Architect for the wealthy, yet his style and use of traditional materials still have an appeal to British tastes across the board. Indeed, there are new homes being built today called ‘The Lutyens’ and it is possible to seek out original Lutyens-designed properties for sale, since his output was prolific, continuing from age 20 until his death at 74, with no holidays.

His largest project was the planning of New Delhi, including the Indian President’s official residence and one of the smallest was the Cenotaph in Whitehall, the focus of Remembrance Sunday. He was also responsible for Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, the largest of its kind, at 1:12 scale of a royal palace.

Lutyens met garden designer Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) when he first established his practice and their shared artistry and passion for rural craftmanship underlined hundreds of collaborations. The rise of the upper middle-class provided a ready market for Lutyens’s imaginative and impressive country houses, often featured in the glossy magazine ‘Country Life’ (1897-). His 800+ projects also included the last castle to be built in the UK – Castle Drogo – and he was working on Liverpool’s R.C. Cathedral (unfinished) when he died.

(Images: A Lutyens house (Goddards) by Mark Perey at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0, bust of Lutyens by Sjukmidlands at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Of the UK’s 15 National Parks, Dartmoor is the 9th largest, with 368 sq.miles, while its neighbour, Exmoor, is the 10th largest with 267 sq.miles. Together they span the north-south breadth of south-west England, mainly in Devon and partly in Somerset. They both take their names from their rivers, the Dart and Exe respectively and they are both home to the UK’s oldest breeds of pony.

Both ponies reach around 12hh and they are extremely well suited to what can be a gruelling environment. They both have their own Pony Societies, established in the 1950s, to maintain the studbooks. The Exmoor pony is the most endangered of the two, but small herds are being utilised around the country for grazing difficult terrains and this type of program is helping to boost their numbers.

In addition to the ponies there are other rare species enjoying the hills and plains of the moors, such as red deer, the cuckoo and the UK’s largest beetle. There are numerous listed buildings and scheduled monuments within the area, which seems to have attracted many Bronze and Iron Age settlers, judging by archaeological evidence. Today, millions of tourists visit annually to walk, cycle, swim and admire the beautiful scenery.

(Top image: Wsupermain2 at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0)

Newcastle-upon-Tyne (as opposed to Staffordshire’s market town of Newcastle-under-Lyme) is England’s northernmost city by a tiny fraction of a degree from Carlisle on the opposite, western coast. Newcastle (for short) has a population of 290,000 and lies 8.5 miles from the eastern coast. It sits on the north bank of the busy River Tyne in the county of Tyne and Wear.

Unsurprisingly, there is a medieval stone castle in Newcastle. It was built on the site of a Roman fort on Hadrian’s Wall and was used as a prison. The wool trade through to the heavy industrial era ensured Newcastle’s continued growth and importance as a North Sea port. In 1530 a law gave Newcastle the monopoly on exporting coal from the whole area and this led to the saying “carry coals to Newcastle”, meaning to supply something to a place where it is already in abundance!

Natives of Newcastle have the Geordie dialect, which many southerners find difficult to understand though the overall sound of it is friendly and pleasing to the ear. The words are more closely related to Old English, Norse and even Dutch, Scots and Romany than the ones used in the south, where Norman French had more influence.

(Top image of bridges over the Tyne: Chris Morgan at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The unique village of Portmeirion at the foot of Snowdonia has no full-time residents and is purely for tourists, some of whom stay in the hotel or self-catering cottages. The Ymddiriedolaeth Clough Williams-Ellis Foundation now owns the village but it was originally a riverside mansion estate called Aber Iâ, then was purchased in 1925 for £4,000 by Northamptonshire-born architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis (1888-1978). He had the vision and the funds to fill his “romantic experiment” with small buildings and follies, many bought at auction, that he thought were sympathetic to the Welsh landscape, though many would describe Portmeirion as Italianate.

It was also the film location for the seventeen episodes of TV’s ‘The Prisoner’ (1967-68) whose afficionados congregate there every year. Patrick McGoohan (1928-2009) played an ex-secret agent held prisoner in the surreal village even though he seems free to roam. The towers, tinkling bells, colonnades, piazza, balconies, triumphal arch, trompe l’oeuil windows, ponds, fountains, scaled-down houses, 70-acre woodland and sandy beach all added to the quirky atmosphere of the show.

Williams-Ellis’s daughter, Susan (1918-2007), a gifted designer, established Portmeirion Potteries Ltd with husband Euan Cooper-Willis in 1961, selling from a shop in the village but manufacturing in Stoke-on-Trent, and her table- and kitchenware are very popular.

(Top image showing giant chessboard in the village centre: Mike McBey at Flickr.com / CC BY 2.0)

The Romans called it ‘Dubris’ and the Saxons named England’s closest transit point to Europe ‘Dofras’. The 19th century saw the population of Kent’s town of Dover increase six-fold due to the development of its harbour, both for defence purposes and, after the railways and trams were invented, for commercial travel. The Strait of Dover is all that separates Dover from France, just 23 miles away. It is the UK’s busiest ferry port and it is perhaps its geographical vulnerability which deters its expansion into a city.

As part of its fortifications, Dover Castle was built and re-built after the Norman invaders set fire to it. Dover was attacked by the French in the 13th century and in WW2 it was shelled from the French coastline, but it held fast. King Charles II (1630-85) landed on its beach in the Restoration, as did thousands of soldiers evacuating from Dunkirk in 1940.

Several engineering solutions have been implemented to combat the problem of shingle mounting up in the harbour mouth, hence the long piers and the separation of the ‘refuge’ harbour of 610 acres from the commercial harbour of 68 acres.

Dover’s iconic chalk cliffs were immortalised in this WW2 song performed by Dame Vera Lynn (1917-2020):

(Top image of Dover Castle as seen from the English Channel: Alex Dawson at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Predicting British weather by means of traditional sayings is surely just as successful as an electronic app, since conditions can change from hour to hour. Perhaps the most well-known weather rhyme is: “Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning”, and there is another version using ‘sailor’ instead of ‘shepherd’, demonstrating the practicality of this piece of weather wisdom.

Observation of the sky, animals and plants has given rise to these examples:-

• Ne’er cast a clout (clothing) till May be out.
• Clear moon, frost soon.
• Fogs in February, frosts in May.
• A wet May brings a load of hay.
• If Candlemas Day (2nd February) be cold and clear, there’ll be two winters in the year.
• If the ash [buds] before the oak, then there’ll be a regular soak. If the oak before the ash, then there’ll only be a splash.
• If at dimpsey (twilight) the frogs do croakin’, we’em be soon due a soakin’.

Rain is due if: cows are lying down, “it’s black over Bill’s mother’s”, geese are cackling.

A storm is due if: cats are going crazy, dogs are eating grass, geese are flying low.

It can also be “too cold to snow”.

(Image: pickpik.com / CC0)

The city of Bath in Somerset is renowned for its natural thermal springs, easily the hottest in the UK at around 45ºC. A geological quirk gifted Bath with this product of artesian pressure, which has drawn millions of visitors over the centuries, many of them seeking healing from the water’s mineral composition of sulphate calcium, chloride, sodium, bicarbonate, magnesium, silicon and iron.

The Romans called the place Aquae Sulis (Sul was a local deity) and built public baths fed by the hot springs which are still a major tourist attraction. Indeed, although a wool trade existed in the area at one time, tourism has been Bath’s primary economic activity since the 18th century. There are three springs ~ King’s, Hetling and Cross ~ and they are protected by a Royal Charter of 1591 and the 1982 County of Avon Act.

Bath and N.E. Somerset Council monitor all construction works in the vicinity to ensure they do not interfere with the springs.  In particular, there is a circular zone around them with bans on excavations ranging from below 5 to below 50 metres, from the inner to the outer rim. The source of the heat is some 2,500 metres down but these measures safeguard the water’s path upwards.

(Image of Roman bath at Bath: Julian P Guffogg at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The UK’s first significant stretch of motorway comprised the M1’s junctions 5-18, opened in 1959, though the M6 in Preston had a small section opened the previous year. With no speed limit and unschooled drivers treating these straight, wide roads as race tracks even in fog, there were thousands of crashes in those early days. One issue was the clarity of signage, which obviously had to be read and understood at speed.

This led to several years of experimentation and debate before the optimal designs and standards were selected for motorway signs. The Road Research Laboratory tested different ideas in Hyde Park, Slough and part of the M1, among other places. The Anderson Report of 1962 was expanded on by the Worboys Report of 1963 and both of these Committees employed the services of graphic designers Richard ‘Jock’ Kinneir (1917-94) from Hampshire and S.African émigrée Margaret Calvert (1936-).

Their recommendations included having a blue background behind reflective white, mixed-case lettering, for which they designed a new typeface called ‘Transport’ (this is also now used on the government website). This aids word-shape recognition and best use of space. Kinneir and Calvert went on to design all other British road signs, using pictograms instead of text wherever possible.

(Image: Steve Daniels at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

British and French tribes were inhabiting the chalky Hampshire valley of Wenta, with River Itchen winding its way down to the English Channel, when the Romans arrived and upgraded it to a town, its ground level being 12ft. below that of Winchester today. The original concept of a crossroads with gates at the ends of the four roads, with a large central marketplace, partially survived in subsequent city layouts.

In 871 Alfred the Great (848/9-99) made Winchester the administrative centre of Wessex and it became second only to London in importance. The Normans built a castle there and this remained a royal residence until the 1550s. Cromwell (1599-1658) demolished it in 1649 leaving only the Great Hall, now displaying a 13th century replica, wall-hung, 18ft. diameter legless Round Table.

In 1141 the city was the scene of the supporters of King Stephen (c.1097-1154) fighting to gain his release from Empress Matilda’s imprisonment and there was a devastating fire. In the 14th century, restoration work included the founding of the prestigious Winchester College, a few streets away from Winchester Cathedral. Seven English Kings and local author Jane Austen (1775-1817) are buried in the Cathedral, which was erected in 1079 and had seven different styles added over five centuries.

(Top image of Winchester’s medieval Kingsgate with modern repairs: Geoff Henson at Flickr.com / CC BY-ND 2.0)